Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Almost 140 years on from the terrifying events in heart of London’s East End, the question that still haunts the soul of anyone with a conscious, anyone who seeks to understand how such evil could exist, is why? That why, that question in the shadows that dares raise its voice against the so called supremacy of the Victorian era, that highlights the sheer gall of the upper class as they waged war on the poor, the destitute, women, children, and all who didn’t fit into their image of a perfect gentile society, never becomes fully answered because everybody wants to know who, always the perpetrator and never the reason.

Numerous books have been written on the subject of Jack The Ripper, psychological breakdowns of the area, the myth, the killer, it’s an industry that will always sate the appetite of the would-be armchair detective, that any new revelation afforded even the barest connection to the murders is poured over and chewed upon until it is digested like gristle, unsavoury, lacking substance, and neglecting the most saliant of points…why?

There have been some exceptional and dedicated theories placed before the fiction reader, those that offer an insight to the period between late August and that gruesome November night when the final canonical victim perished in her small and well-worn room, but it is with relish that those same readers are offered an answer from Ruth Parry in the novel, Five Shadows. 

Never mind who was Jack, who took on that cartoonish but fearsome nom de guerre, or rather nom de gore, never mind the fact that everybody needs someone to blame, to perhaps absolve their own lies and deceits that keep them on the right side of sanity and the law, it is the story of the women involved, what could have connected five seemingly ordinary women, strangers to the outside world, to come to such a grizzly end.

Everybody knows the events, that is not the question, but Ruth Parry’s seductive and clinical writing in Five Shadows takes heart from one of the finest factual books written on the subject, Hailee Rubenhold’s The Five and perhaps from the film Murder By Decree, but with a sense of balance that leaves the reader gripped, placing trust in the writer’s sheer magical delivery of conspiracy and objectivity as she weaves a tale of discovery, of class war, of fear into a reasoned debate, and a story that captivates from the first breath in the dark.

Ruth Parry has found a way to inject life into a reality, of making sure that those women, and millions like them across the ages, are never forgotten.

Ian D. Hall